“See ya, Hap,” a teenaged boy yelled out the passenger window.
“Count on it, asshole,” Stella’s newfound companion called back. “Jimmy Elliot and his friends,” he explained once the car had sped down Lockhart. “Jimmy’s a total idiot. I tutor him in English and earth science, so I ought to know. We’ve got a lot of morons around here.”
“There were plenty of those in my old school,” Stella said. “Except they were all girls.”
“You went to an all-girls school? That sounds worse than Unity.”
They introduced themselves then. He was Hap Stewart, Dr. Stewart’s grandson, who lived on the other side of the woods, past the Elliots’ property.
“I’m living with my grandmother,” Stella said. “Over at Cake House.”
“Oh, I know.” Hap grinned that huge grin of his. “I know everything about you. Well, maybe not everything,” he amended when Stella seemed displeased by this notion. Still, he admitted they hadn’t met accidentally. He’d been waiting for her on the corner. “My grandfather said you might need help getting settled.”
“Well, I don’t.” The last thing Stella needed was someone feeling sorry for her.
“The real reason I came was because I wanted to meet you. You’re our closest neighbor—all you have to do is cut through the woods, go round the poison ivy, avoid getting any ticks, and walk five miles and you’ll be at my door.”
Stella laughed. “Lucky me.”
“I thought you could use some friendly advice on the way things are around here. Like for instance you might want to let people get to know you before they find out who you are.”
A school bus went by, and in the wake of its smoky exhaust Stella felt that fizzy feeling in her head. Was this boy telling her to hide her identity? Did he think he was doing her a favor by letting her know she wouldn’t be accepted?
“It’s because of my father,” Stella guessed. There were several groups of kids on their way to school farther up Lockhart, all turning onto Main Street at the intersection where the oldest oak tree in the Commonwealth had stood for over three hundred years.
“Your father?” Hap said.
“It’s because he’s in jail.”
“Is he? Wow. I don’t know if anyone from Unity has ever been in jail before.”
Now Stella felt even more of a fool. She’d defended an unhappy fact of her life that Hap hadn’t known about. She was overdressed, a nervous wreck, and now she had broken into a sweat. Stella wondered if she might have to breathe into a paper bag, the way her father sometimes did when he was anxious. She slipped off her woolen sweater and stuffed it into her backpack.
“He’s not guilty of anything. He’ll be out on bail soon.”
They walked along in silence for a while. In truth, Stella was grateful not to be approaching the high school on her own. They were passing the old oak, around which the brick sidewalk was buckling; the overgrown roots stretched out for most of an entire block, braided through brick and asphalt and grass.
“What were the charges against him?” Hap asked.
“Murder.” They both leaped over the twisted roots of the oak. Several older people in town had tripped at this very same spot, and they cursed the tree each time they went by. But the elementary school children planned field trips to the oak; they circled round and danced on the first day of spring. “He was only picked up for questioning,” Stella added.
“I see.” Hap was obviously impressed.
“But he didn’t do it,” Stella informed Hap.
“Of course not.”
The girls at the Rabbit School would all be jealous if they could see Stella now, walking down the road with a tall, handsome boy, discussing dead horses and murder as if such things were an everyday occurrence. She couldn’t wait to report back to Juliet Aronson. Hap Stewart’s best feature? Definitely his height.
“I just want you to know that there are people at school who always believe the worst. Especially when it comes to Cake House. Some idiots have offered a hundred bucks to anyone who walks the path where nothing grows and survives to tell the tale. Jimmy Elliot made it halfway down. He swears he saw the dead horse. It was more likely marsh gas. Maybe it was gas from Jimmy. He is definitely full of it.”
They laughed at that, and Stella felt more relaxed.
“Why doesn’t anything grow on the path you were talking about?”
“That’s where Rebecca Sparrow’s blood fell. There aren’t even any weeds now. That’s how strong her blood was.”